


The most Important Part

by Hecate



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 17:17:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8022427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: When they leave, Jupiter comes with them.





	The most Important Part

This is how it begins:

“She was murdered,” a daughter says, old grief pulling at the edges of her mouth, making her look – just this once – as old as she truly is.

“My mother went through a profound change at the end of her life,” a son says, and this is the only time he doesn't lie.

“You begged me to do it,” another son screams, rage and despair in every word, his voice breaking and shattering all over them.

This is how it begins; 

and this how it ends:

“I'm not your damn mother,” 

the swing of iron and the fury of a queen.

In truth, it doesn't begin like that at all, and the ending is still far ahead. But it's the easier story; a story that wants to be told, even though most of it is a lie.

***

It begins:

“They deserve better,” his mother says.

Balem stares.

“The cattle?” he asks, just to make sure.

Seraphi frowns. “They aren't cattle.”

“They are product,” Balem tries.

“Yes,” his mother agrees, and he is relieved.

But then, 

“And yet, they deserve better.”

He is glad then that his siblings aren't there to hear Seraphi's words. Because as simple as these words are, they would be his mother's end. They still could be. It worries him, and he despises the feeling, the rough edges of it, almost obscene in its simplicity.

His mother must have read him, understood him, just as she usually does. And she smiles that bright and sudden bend of her lips, that smile she only ever gives to him.

“I have a plan, Balem.”

He should have known. She always does.

~

He kills her in the morning, his fingers around her throat, digging into soft skin, her face twisting into something new and ugly.

She dies, and it's the first time he hates her.

They bring her back two days later, hours after his brother and his sister visited her body, come to see if she was truly dead.

His mother smiles at him as if he hadn't lost her, as if her return had been a sure thing. She smiles but her absence has yet to fade away. She touches her throat briefly, the traces of his fingers faint on her skin, and reaches out to touch him.

“Thank you,” his mother says before she leaves. 

He spends decades telling himself that she is dead.

~

A refinery burns in the Pleiades, slowing down production.

An accident postpones a harvest.

A planet vanishes, a hole between the stars where greens and blues and yellows used to be.

Then, Jupiter happens.

~

He sees her and he hates her.

She has his mother's face but not her smile, she has her voice but not her mind. She's a reminder, a curse, a rival.

In his mother's absence he has grown to hate her as much as he loves her; his feelings have become strange, something unknown deep inside of him, setting him on edge. He can't bear to see her face, knowing that his mother hasn't returned to him, that he is still waiting for her.

And Jupiter's love for Earth is too much like his mother's hatred for the industry, is like a soft echo of his mother's sharp regret and plans. Seraphi left him to save planets filled with ignorant fools, and Jupiter fights him to save just one of them, a few billion humans and a planet close to collapse.

Balem wants to make them both pay.

He wants his mother.

~

He dies in the flames of his empire.

His mother brings him back.

For a moment, between the memories of the fall and the pain of waking, he thinks she is Jupiter. Then, she smiles. 

And he knows.

~

“She owns Earth,” he tells his mother.

“Of course she does,” she replies.

“She killed me,” Balem goes on.

“Of course she did.” She sounds amused. 

They're silent; the memory of his death distracting him.

“I want to meet her,” she says, breaking into his thoughts.

He isn't surprised.

~

His mother arrives on Earth as if she still owned it. And maybe she does, maybe nothing has truly changed and she could simply come back from the dead for all to see to claim it.

Balem doubts it. It would be too much like giving up.

His mother arrives on Earth and he follows in her footsteps, watches as Jupiter sees her, stops, stares.

“Seraphi,” she says.

His mother nods.

“How...”

“Death can be a story, my dear,” his mother says, “you can make it up if you want to.”

It's only then that Jupiter sees him.

“Another story, I guess,” she says, and the hatred in her voice makes him thinks of their last fight, makes him think of fire.

“My mother,” he tells her, “is a great storyteller.”

~

When they leave, Jupiter comes with them.

He doesn't ask why.

~

The spaceship they travel on was a present his mother gave to him centuries ago. He had been very young then, hungry for adventure instead of profit, filled with a yearning for the stars that feels strange and distant to him now. Her gift was a way to rein him in. A spaceship small enough to fly on his own, big enough to travel the universe, but not great enough to escape her plans and her future for him.

“There isn't all that much out there to see,” she had told him, “but go and see for yourself.”

She had been right, of course, and he had put the ship away mere years after he first flew into the black with it.

Back then, she still believed in the industry, still had enough greed to build a company so vast it could eat the stars and remain hungry. She was never supposed to get fed up with it.

But she did.

~

“This,” his mother tells Jupiter, “used to be a planet as lively as Earth, full of people, good people.”

Balem looks at the emptiness surrounding them, the buildings skeletons of a civilization long gone.

“It was a good harvest,” he tells them, remembering all the pretty numbers rising and multiplying.

Jupiter punches him.

It's hardly a surprise.

~

Balem flies the ship.

Sometimes his mother joins him, stretching out on the seat next to his. She tells him about the years between then and now, about the things with which she filled her absence.

A private war against production, a foolish battle she can only lose. But Jupiter escaped his brother, Balem's refinery burned, and he died. So maybe she isn't winning. But neither are they.

~

He sees them sitting together sometimes, silent and unmoving.

Maybe, he thinks, their thoughts are mirrors like their bodies and faces; maybe, they don't have to speak to each other at all.

He never asks.

~

“Why did you try to kill me?” she asks, and Balem laughs.

“You tried to take Earth away from me.”

“You wanted to harvest it! Why did you want to do that? You helped your mother!”

“He helped me because he loves me,” his mother says, suddenly standing in the door. “That doesn't mean he agrees with me.”

Jupiter looks at his mother, turns back to him. “Then why do you stay with us now?”

He shrugs and doesn't tell her that he doesn't know what to do now that his mother is back. He could rebuild his empire; it shouldn't be too hard, the work of a few decades. But that would mean leaving his mother.

And he just got her back.

~

His mother points to the stars, a bright light here, a cluster of so many colours there. And Balem guides the ship to wherever she wants them to go. It's strangely peaceful.

~

“You wanted children,” Jupiter says to his mother, and Seraphi smiles.

“I don't remember if I chose them for desire or politics. It's been so long and it was only one decision of countless in thousands of years.”

Jupiter stares, and Balem wonders how Earth and its humans live through their softness, how they don't shatter and splinter under the indifference of the universe around them.

“Maybe you chose them because you were lonely,” she finally says.

His mother nods. “Maybe I was. But if so, they weren't the solution.”

~

Jupiter sits down in the seat that he thinks of as his mother's, her eyes on the stars that fill the view ahead of them.

“How long was she gone?” she asked.

He shrugs. “I didn't count the years.”

“Tell me about who she used to be,” she says then, and he almost laughs at the demand. But he can't, he won't, and he doesn't understand why.

He looks away from the universe then, looks at Jupiter and sees all the ways she doesn't look like his mother. Nods and starts at the beginning.

It's a long story. But it feels as if they’ve got the time for it.

~

He used to be alone in the cockpit of his spaceship, his mother travelling through it just like they are travelling through space. Now, Jupiter joins him, too, careful and ever-watching, her mouth spilling questions into the distance between them.

“Tell me about the stars,” she asks, and he doesn't wonder why she came to him when his mother could have told her as much and even more. He just speaks of all the things he has seen, of all the shades of colours and blacks the universe spits at him.

“Tell me about your sister,” she says, and he thinks of her smile and her grace, her softness and the steel hidden beneath it.

“Tell me about your brother,” she says, and his voice is filled with contempt but so, clearly, is her heart. It's strange to find common ground in that, in the brother that almost took Earth and failed just like Balem did.

“Tell me about her,” she says, and she always means his mother.

She asks and he answers, the universe becoming smaller as he flies the ship and it eats the distance just as their voices do.

~

“Will you let me fly it?” Jupiter asks, and he stands up to give her his seat.

~

His mother wants to go back to Earth and doesn't give any reasons, just puts her finger on that one dot on the star map.

And he goes, just like he always did, turns away from the vastness that kept on coming and sends them flying back the way they’ve already travelled.

“Did she tell you why?” Jupiter asks him. He shakes his head.

“Apparently she got a weird message,” she explains, and it's strange that he feels no anger towards her now, for the way his mother trusted Jupiter with her words instead of him.

He used to hate Jupiter for all the ways she wasn't like his mother.

It was simple, easy. 

No wonder it all went wrong back then.

~

When they return to Earth, it's a wasteland of blue ash, the streets and buildings filled with it. At his side, his mother makes the strangest sound. Behind him, Jupiter is silent.

It's her hand he takes.

“How?” his mother finally asks. “It's my planet, it's...”

“No,” he tells her. “It hasn't been for a long time.”

“I'm alive,” she reminds him, her voice brittle with something that can't be grief but isn't quite anger.

“You were dead long enough,” he counters, and her eyes narrow.

Jupiter speaks up, voice familiarly hard. It's the first time she truly sounds like his mother. “That doesn't make it yours.”

He swallows an angry retort. “It's not anybody's now.”

It's only then that she starts to cry.

~

He flies the ship.

Jupiter's planet falls away behind them.

~

It was his little brother who harvested Earth.

Balem isn't surprised. Titus has always been charming, but he was as bad at playing with others as Balem, no matter how good he was at covering it up with his smiles and all the little stories he told to whoever was close enough to listen.

“I want him dead,” Jupiter tells him not long after they leave Earth behind, the echo of her grief clinging to her voice, the sound of it new and fragile and yet so very sharp.

He smiles at her for the first time then, feels his lips bend into an unfamiliar shape. “I wanted that for a long time.”

“So help me,” she asks, demands, and he wants to say yes.

“My mother won't be pleased,” he tells her instead.

Jupiter shrugs, the movement violent, pushing her body into motion. “You murdered her. Why do you even care?”

He frowns. “It's what she wanted me to do.”

She laughs, and the sound has teeth in it. “You're a few thousand years old. It's really time you stopped doing that.”

He doubts he ever will.

~

He flies the ship.

Earth lies days behind them. 

His mother kisses Jupiter.

~

She comes to him again, leaning against the wall and staring at the stars.

“They look different now,” she tells him, and he doesn't say anything, doesn't tell her that he doesn't understand. “They look lonely,” she goes on, and he tries to see what she sees, tries to see stars that miss this one light between them just because it's lifeless now.

But he can't.

“I'm not the one that left you,” Jupiter says, and it pulls him away from the universe and back into the ship, back to her.

He nods.

“So stop pretending I am.”

~

Balem doesn't remember ever loving Titus, only knows the disdain and distance between them. He could ask his mother if they had ever been different, but he doubts he could trust her words and memories.

There are too many things she sees differently now. She is changed beyond repair.

But so is he.

He tells Jupiter that he will help her, and he tells himself that he isn't afraid of his mother's disappointment, tells himself that he deserves his brother's death as much as his mother deserved her absence.

Tells himself that she will forgive him for what he will do, just as he had to forgive her for her parting and her return.

“I'm glad,” Jupiter says, and he can't see the girl she used to be in her answer or in the way she reaches out for him. She is still soft under his hands, just as she had been when he first met her. Soft until she turned into steel and anger and pain, until she pushed him and killed him.

This time, she pulls him down and pulls him in. This time, he goes willingly.

~

His brother dies in the evening, Jupiter standing above him, looking for once like a queen.

He wants to kneel for her.

~

Jupiter is behind him, her fingers warm against his shoulders, her presence as solid as a promise she intends to keep.

“Where to?” Balem asks his mother, hands on the controls.

She doesn't answer, and he wonders if she thinks of the blood that trailed Jupiter and him when they returned, the blood that they haven't wiped off yet, that clings to the floor and his fingernails, rusty and dry. She doesn't answer, and the shadow of grief wraps around her, cocoons her in. 

And yet, she stays with him, with them.

Balem thinks she might be just as trapped as he is, caught up between all the things they did and everything they still could do, a future that gleams like a knife, a future that they can turn into a weapon.

They just have to choose an enemy.

~

But still, after all this, this isn't quite the beginning.

***

This is how it begins.

Two queens with a strange boy between them, a boy who once dreamt of becoming a king; two queens and a boy and the universe stretching out all around them like a dream.


End file.
